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Procedía - Social and Behavioral Sciences 212 (2015) 52 - 60
MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC CHALLENGES. 33rd Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA), XXXIII AESLA CONFERENCE, 16-18 April 2015, Madrid, Spain
"Hey there! I am using WhatsApp": a preliminary study of recurrent discursive realisations in a corpus of WhatsApp statuses
Alfonso Sánchez-Moyaa, Olga Cruz-Moyab *
aUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Profesor Aranguren, s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, 28040, Spain bUniversidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla, Ctra. de Utrera, Km. 1, Sevilla, 41013, Spain
Abstract
This paper seeks to contribute to the recent academic study of WhatsApp, the instant messaging (IM) tool that enables people to communicate in a multimodal way mainly via their smartphones and which has impressively become a core form of communication in many social communities (Church & Oliveira, 2013; Sultan, 2014). This study presents research on the most salient discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in WhatsApp statuses, this is, the communicative output of a 139-character blank where WhatsApp users are prompted to write any message in order to complete their profile information.
Research on both the discourse of Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) and communicative practices associated to it is vast (Barton & Lee, 2013; Crystal, 2006). Perhaps due to its more established status as communication media, studies in this field have mostly paid attention to the discourse of text messages (Thurlow & Brown, 2003), commonly referred to as textese. More specifically, possibly driven by the apocalyptic and somewhat mediatised visions attributed to the language used in these online communication tools (Thurlow, 2006), academic research has largely aimed to prove the not-so-negative effects of textese in communicative practices and contexts (Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008; Plester et al, 2009; Drouin, 2011). Nonetheless, due to its crucial role in plenty of social communities, research has gradually shed light on the discourse used in IM tools (Baron, 2005; Lee, 2007).
The great and rather recent impact of WhatsApp as a form of communication is triggering academic research on the discourse that characterises this IM system. In spite of being remarkably under-researched from a discursive perspective, existing studies explore some language features of WhatsApp (Calero-Vaquera, 2014), making great emphasis on its multimodal character. Far less attention has been devoted however to the discourse of the 139-character blank provided by WhatsApp to allow users update their statuses, even though similar types of communicative outcome has widely been investigated in other systems of online communication, namely Facebook (Garcia & Sikstrom, 2014; Eisenlauer, 2014).
* Corresponding author. Tel.: (+34) 91 394 5383. E-mail address: asmoya@ucm.es
1877-0428 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Scientific Committee of the XXXIII AESLA CONFERENCE doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.298
As far as methodology is concerned, the objectives of this study are to examine recurrent discursive realisations and how these are realised from a discursive perspective, to identify the most frequent pragmatic uses and to put forward the possible reasons behind this choice. Thus, this paper analyses a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses randomly selected from the total sample of 523 contacts. Once the final corpus was computerised, a set of tags was designed in order to quantify the most frequent instances. As regards the analytical framework, partly driven by the character of the analysed status, this research relies on contributions in which multimodality is at core of their theoretical underpinnings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin, 2013).
Findings outline the most common discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses. Apart from elucidating already existing research on the discourse of WhatsApp, they also demonstrate the centrality of multimodal discourse in this sort of communication (Vincent, 2012) and pave the way for further research within this field of study.
© 2015 The Authors. Publishedby ElsevierLtd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Scientific Committee of the XXXIII AESLA CONFERENCE Keywords: multimodality; Whatsapp's statuses; IM language and communication; discourse; pragmatics
1. Introduction
This paper seeks to contribute to the recent academic study of WhatsApp, the instant messaging (IM) tool that enables people to communicate in a multimodal way mainly via their smartphones and which has impressively become a core form of communication in many social communities (Church & Oliveira, 2013; Sultan, 2014). This study presents research on the most salient discursive realisations in WhatsApp statuses, this is, the communicative output of a 139-character blank where WhatsApp users are prompted to write any message in order to complete their profile information.
2. Theoretical background
2.1. The Internet, technologies, and identity issues
Quite undeniably, the 'domestication' of technology (Berker et al., 2006) brought together the widespread use of the Internet and a consequent transformation of everyday communicative practices in, inter alia, professional, educational and interpersonal realms (Thorne et al., 2015). Despite its fast progress, we are still witnessing the eruption of different kind of software that caters for communicative needs, much of it characterised by relying on online settings (Thorne & Fisher, 2012).
Although the range of online communicative scenarios is wide and it may even seem to have standardised functionalities, they have their own peculiarities. What remains clear, however, is that most online environments "constitute primary settings through which routine constructions of identity are created, and curated, through the use of textual and multimodal expression" (Thorne et al., 2015). Based on the assumption that identity is a relational, dynamic process involving the "social positioning of the self and other" (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), constantly performed depending on the recognition, confirmation or rejection of other people (Butler, 1990), researchers exploring digital environments are observing that many individuals, across different sets of age generations, cultures and backgrounds, "curate online personas" (Thompson, 2008) in digitally mediated environments and social practices.
2.2. WhatsApp, digital discourse and multimodality
WhatsApp is a rather-new and very popular tool that enables people to communicate using instant messaging. Apart from sending text messages, it also offers a broad spectrum of affordances (Crystal, 2006) to choose from when sharing information (emoticons, images and pictures, voice notes, videos and web links, and so forth). WhatsApp allows its users to provide personal information and create their own digital profile. In this case, users are prompted to include a picture, a nickname and a status, a 139-character blank where users are encouraged to describe their online persona.
Generally speaking, WhatsApp discourse is believed to share elements deriving from both written and spoken varieties of the language, which is why realisations of digital discourse are thought to be "oralised written texts" (Yus, 2011; Calero-Vaquera, 2014). This is also why digital discourse is defined by its "hybrid" character, since most of its features seem to be originated in the process of transferring orally-oriented discourse to the written form.
It is precisely the blending of verbal realisations with visual and even acoustic ones that makes WhatsApp a very rich multimodal medium of communication!. This is why it is common to find that elements from different modes are naturally intertwined in most of the messages exchanged by its users. Perhaps one of the most salient multimodal devices WhatsApp has is that of emojis, a set of emoticons (or smileys) that can incorporate in the chunks of digital discourse produced by users. It is perhaps due to its pervasiveness in this kind of discourse what is driving researchers to consider their role in it, and it is no coincidence that they are also central for this study. A selection of these is shown in Figure 1 below.
2.3. Previous research lines and research gap
The great and rather recent impact of WhatsApp as a form of communication is triggering academic research on the discourse that characterises this instant messaging software. In spite of being remarkably under-researched from a discursive perspective, existing studies explore some language features of WhatsApp (Calero-Vaquera, 2014), making great emphasis on its multimodal character.
Far less attention has been devoted however to the discourse of the 139-character blank provided by WhatsApp to allow users update their statuses, even though similar types of communicative outcome has widely been investigated in other systems of online communication, namely Facebook (Garcia & Sikstrom, 2014; Eisenlauer, 2014) or Twitter (Zappavigna, 2012; Gillen & Merchant, 2013)
3. Methodological issues
3.1. Objectives and research questions
The main objective of this paper is to provide a preliminary exploration of the most common discursive realisations of WhatsApp statuses. Furthermore, this research attempts to show if prototypically-used sociological variables (such as age) may play a role when using some discursive realisations against others. For these objectives to be accomplished, we drew the following research questions: (1) what are the most common discursive realisations of WhatsApp statuses?, and (2) do these discursive realisations vary when analysed in the light of prototypical sociological variables such as age?
Fig. 1. Emojis collection (image source: http://getemoji.com/).
I In line with Stockl's (2004) and Bolander & Locher (2014) understanding of multimodality.
3.2. Corpus description
This paper focuses on analysing a corpus of 420 WhatsApp statuses from two sets of mobile phone contacts. Participants represent a wide range of age, sex, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, since they are both women and men (247 women and 173 men), from their teens to their sixties and with diverse cultures and native languages (namely Spanish). For space constraints, we decided that the only relevant variable to consider for the purposes of this study was that of age. We agreed to organise the total number of participants considering a ten-year gap lapse to somehow guarantee a generational difference (Graph 1 below).
Total sample (420) - age range
4% ■ 20-29
19% 22% ■ 30-39
I 40-49
m A W ■ 50-59
30% ■ 60-69
Graph 1: Participants' age range.
3.3. Data collection and data analysis
Statuses that integrate the corpus that we eventually analysed were collected in March 2015 in order to avoid interferences with special (and possible over-referenced) events such as Christmas. Having done this, we organised our whole corpus according to their external discursive morphology. It was at this point when we observed that some variables, such as sex, nationality or native language would be disregarded for this study, since variation as far as external discursive morphology is concerned was only representative when the age variable was applied. Still, issues coming from possible effects that sex or users' first language may be of interest of future research.
4. Results and data discussion
WhatsApp statuses in the analysed corpus can be grouped in two overarching categories: automatically-generated (AGSs) (1) and self-generated statuses (SGSs). Then, within the latter, four sub-typologies were identified: purely-verbal (SGS-PV) (2), hybrid (SGS-H) (3), purely-iconic (SGS-PI) (4) and blank realisations (SGS-B) (5).
(1) 'Hey there! I am using Whatsapp', 'Battery about to die'
(2) 'Wish you were here', 'Reach me at Telegram'
(3) Life is a^, open it!
(4) ~Si ■ Tgr
(5)[ ]
Table 1 below illustrates the proportion of users (%) in our corpus that opted for any of the former. Similarly, Table 2 considers the age variable and shows the percentage of users in the different age ranges according to the external morphology of their WhatsApp status. Both tables are afterwards analysed and interpreted.
Table 1. Users (%) and discursive realisations of their WhatsApp statuses according to proposed taxonomy.
Ststus according to external discursive Number of
morphology participants
Automatically-generated statuses (AGSs)
Self-generated statuses (SGSs)
Purely-verbal (SGS-V)
Hybrid (SGS-H)
Purely-iconic (SGS-IC)
Blank (SGS-B)
147 137
27 420
% total sample
35% 32,61%
16,42% 9,52%
6,42% 100%
Table 2. Users (%) and discursive realisations of their WhatsApp statuses according to the age variable.
Status/Age 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69
AGS 12.24% 20.40% 31.97% 26.53% 8.84%
SGS-Verbal 27.73% 24.08% 27.73% 18.97% 1.45%
SGS-Hybrid 24.63% 33.33% 33.33% 8.69% 0%
SGS-Iconic 42.5% 30% 22.5% 5% 0%
SGS-Blank 7.40% 22.22% 37.03% 25.92% 7.40%
4.1. Automatically-generated statuses (AGSs)
A relatively large amount of users in our corpus (unwillingly or not) have their WhatsApp profiles accompanied by automatically-generated statuses. In fact, 147 users in the corpus (35% of the total sample) represent this possibility. It should be noted that in this percentage we are including both contacts using the "Hey there!" formula and also those with one of the options offered by WhatsApp. J Quite expectedly, this tendency is not uniform along the total sample, since a higher tendency to maintain automatically-generated statuses in profiles is observed as the age cohort increases, as Table 1 above points out. It is worth recalling however that three quarters of the total sample fall in the first three age ranges (20-49), which also explains the fall in the use of AGS from that subgroup onwards.
This tendency can be explained from different perspectives. First, it is possible to argue that users older than 50 have little interest in reshaping their digital identity, thus adhering to already-given statuses. Interestingly enough though, it is common to find how these users tend to provide a picture of themselves when completing their profiles. Another possibility is that users represented by these age groups are not even aware of this space or they do not even know how to use it. Both options come as no surprise when acknowledging the impact that new technologies and new forms of communication (and therefore new identities) may have had on these people, which is remarkably inferior than that to other age groups.
4.2. Self-generated statuses (SGSs)
4.2.1. Self-generated statuses: purely-verbal realisations (SGS-V)
As pointed out, 137 participants (32.61% of the total corpus) opted for using purely-verbal elements to complete their digital profile. Looking deeper into our corpus, we observed that the tendency to use purely-verbal discursive
| This may certainly pose some methodological problems; since we observed rather ironic attitudes in users opting for statuses such as "At the gym" even though there is little chance participants behind those statuses have ever been there!
choices in WhatsApp statuses was a common practice across most age groups in which our sample was divided, as Table 1 above depicted.
Purely-verbal statuses in our corpus are characterised by certain degree of uniformity, both in terms of form and content. Remarkably, most of these statuses were written in the standard varieties of the language in which they were expressed, with little attempt to recur to rather prototypical textual features of this type of discourse (Thurlow & Brown, 2003; Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008). This was an interesing finding because features of textese are commonly present in WhatsApp conversations (Sánchez-Moya & Cruz-Moya, 2015) in which users have no character limitations (as they do when writing their status). Nevertheless, instances of more-unattended punctuation marks and stylised spelling forms are still frequent.
4.2.2. Self-generated statuses: hybrid realisations (SGS-H)
A total of 69 participants in our corpus opted for a hybrid status, which represents 16.42% of the whole sample. Prior to processing data, our initial hypothesis was connected to the idea that the lower the age range, the higher the tendency to use hybrid statuses. This could be easily justified by the greater exposure of younger generations to multimodality in their communication practices. However, as again Table 1 above illustrates, our corpus suggests a slightly higher number of users in the medium age spectrum (30-49) than in the youngest set of participants (20-29). Not surprisingly, this trend becomes less relevant when moving to older age groups.
Formal features of hybrid statuses do not differ much from those expressed only by verbal means. In other words, verbal parts of these pieces of information followed similar lines to purely-verbal realisations. However, the role of icons (by means of emojis) in these hybrid statuses is definitely worth considering. Again driven by space constraints, we will namely outline the most salient uses of emoticons in this context, but this would of course benefit from further research. Thus, we observed that there were three main uses of emoticons in these statuses: (1) to reinforce the information in the message expressed by verbal means, (2), to add semantic value to the verbal message (otherwise incompleted) and (3) to construct short sequences of storytelling. Table 3 below illustrates the aforementioned uses of emoticons, although it is undeniable that a closer look at these instances would surely yield interesting insights to this data.
Table 3. Uses of emoticons in hybrid statuses.
Pragmatic use
Original statuses from corpus
Translated versions
Si no levantas los ojos, creerás que eres el punto más alto W® ¿ (Al 17)
If you don't raise your eyes, you 'II relieve you 're the highest point**-' (TR)
№ sS
(1) Reinforcing verbal message
Me duele la cabeza (A134) My head hurst (TR)
(2) Adding semantic values
(3) Storytelling
me to the moon d (A80) Hola V (0123)
La vida es un U, ábrelo! (029) Modo ® activado! (A53) Feliz (082)
HUÜ^SHORYUKEN! (O83) Feliz!!
Hello \t (TR)
Life is a open it! (TR)
Mode Ql on! (TR)
Happy (TR)
Happy!! (TR)
4.2.3. Self-generated statuses: purely-iconic realisations (SGS-IC)
After processing data deriving from our corpus, we found out that 9.52% of the participants in the total sample (that is 40 out of 420 users) opted for widely-ranged, purely-iconic statuses. Not surprisingly, we reached interesting results after applying the age filter in this subgroup. In fact, and contrary to what had happened in previous cases, purely-iconic statuses are more popular among users belonging to the lower age range here considered (20-29), verifying one of our initial hypothesis. Despite the need for further research in this area, this could be explained by the attempt to transmit a more cryptic kind of communication, reasons for which would need further development. Regardless of this, as Table 1 above confirms, the purely-iconic tendency of WhatsApp statuses decreases as the age range lines increases, accordingly.
4.2.4. Self-generated statuses: blank (SGS-B)
Despite its minor representativeness compared to the rest of the options, the least common realisation in users who self-generated their own WhatsApp status is that of providing a blank space (6.42% of the total sample, 27 participants). By this we mean that these users accessed this space and consciously erased its content (including the default message mentioned in Section 4.1). Although this paper will not concentrate on this realisation, it is worth raising the point that users adhering to this practice fall in the highest age spectrum, as Table 9 below conveys. Again, reasons for this may be several and in need of further research, but this may be explained by these users' less-pressing need to be digitally defined by a WhatsApp status, so much so that they would rather delete any possible means of definition.
5. Conclusions
5.1. Concluding remarks
In the attempt to provide answers to our original research questions, this paper has sought to explore the most common discursive realisations in a set of WhatsApp statuses, a communicative space to which research has paid little attention as far as we are concerned. After analysing the data, it can be argued that, when trying to complete (or reshape) their profile information, WhatsApp users opt for discourse choices that vary if their external discursive morphology is considered. As a result, it is possible to put forward a five-label taxonomy to classify recurrent realisations, visually summarised in Figure 2 below.
(A) Automatically-generated
statuses (AGSs)
Hey there [,+,], At school, Busy, Urgent callsu
Statuses according to externa! discursive morphology
|B) Self-generated statuses (SGSs)
O (6S%)
(Bl) | Purely-verbal (ÎGS-V)
O 32,61% I
One of these days..., Wish you where here
(B2) | Hybrid (5GS-H)
16,42%
, Q Living life
(83) | Purely-iconic (SGS-IC) 1
9,52% I
(B4| | Blank {SGS-B)
Fig. 2. Most common discursive realisations of WhatsApp statuses in our corpus.
As suggested, 65% of the total sample made an attempt to modify the default status provided by WhatsApp. This can be interespreted as the need that most users have to fully complete this seemingly-innocent, character-limited communicative space in order to forge their "online persona", an idea that is supported by existing research on digital identities (Thompson, 2008; Thorne et al., 2015).
As initially hypothesised, we verified that the analysis of this data in the light of different age cohorts play a significant role in the choosing some discursive realisations against others. Thus, we observed that lower age ranges were prone to make a wider use of purely-iconic statuses, many of them characterised by a severely-marked cryptic character. Conversely, we also noticed that participants belonging to higher age ranges clung to either automatically-generated statuses or purely-verbal self-generated ones. This may be explained by the technological skills required both to access the space devoted to one's status (which is not straightforward) and to download the set of emoticons, add to the smartphone keyboard and use it.
5.2. Limitations and further research
One the main problems we encountered when researching for this paper was precisely the paucity of research that characterises this rather undercharted area. As a result, we felt obliged to provide readers with some heavily-loaded theoretical underpinnings. Apart from that, it is difficult for us to make generalisations when such a relatively small corpus is considered. Although the final amount of statuses collected was significant in many other regards, a larger corpus would allow us to find more rich examples and possibly verify some of the communicative patterns we have identified.
For future research, it would be interesting to try to understand the role that emoticons may have to play in relation to pragmatic uses. However, we would need to decipher cryptic information encoded by these purely-iconic statuses, which could only be done by taking a more qualitative stance and directly asking users (especially those using them) about the meaning behind them. Furthermore, it would be worth exploring the reasons why many users express their statuses in a language that is not their native one. Possibilities for this may be varied, from the attempt to build a more sophisticated digital identity to discourage part of the contacts from understanding the message.
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